Blake Gopnik’s life of Andy Warhol is less the chronicle of an advance towards death than a protracted postmortem. Gopnik begins halfway through, at what must have seemed to Warhol like the end. In ...

There was a time when commodity histories were everywhere. They tended to focus on consumption and trade over very long distances. Ulbe Bosma’s The World of Sugar is much more than this sort of book.

Nigel Biggar retired a few months ago from the Regius Professorship of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford. He is a notable figure in the world of moral philosophy, not only because of his ...

Stephan Thernstrom, 56, a professor at Harvard University for 25 years, is considered one of the pre-eminent scholars of the history of race relations in America. He has tenure. He has won prizes and ...

You might shrink from calling a leading Chinese author inscrutable, if that wasn’t the way the Chinese see him too. But Ah Cheng is as much puzzled-over in his homeland as he is widely read. At first ...

When Calouste Gulbenkian died in 1955, The Times compared him to Ferdinand de Lesseps and Cecil Rhodes, two business visionaries who created commercial kingdoms. In the first half of the 20th century, ...

Family life unfolds in David Roberts’s brilliant debut novel, The Way the Day Breaks, in backseat squabbles and sodden walks. There are camping holidays in the Pyrenees and subdued meals in front of ...

‘By the time I landed in Myanmar, the soldiers were already throwing babies in fires,’ Max Fisher writes of his visit to the country in 2017. Houses burned. Rockets slammed into the walls of ...

Robert Skidelsky is a distinguished economic and political historian whose first books were published in the 1960s. Many decades (and volumes) later, he has turned to giving us a warning from history ...

There is a charming naivety to Noo Saro-Wiwa’s travelogue. Focused primarily on trying to capture the experiences of Africans living in China, it becomes a tourist adventure through the country, the ...

Argentina’s history is like a rollercoaster ride. When you think that the economy has sunk to the absolute bottom, you find out that it can fall some more. And then, after a crisis and substantial ...

The lavatory facilities at Trisha’s bar, that glorious survivor of old Soho, adorned with photos of Al Capone and the pope, bear a legend written at eye level: ‘USE AS URINAL ONLY. NO SITTING.’ Except ...